Joanna Biggs

‘Ihope the book gives you a sense of joy, something to immerse yourself in that is not the horrific news that we’ve been experiencing constantly and relentlessly since March,’ Brit Bennett said of her new novel. The Vanishing Half came out a week after George Floyd was choked to death on a Minneapolis sidewalk; the novel itself begins weeks after Martin Luther King was...

‘Iwould like to be able to photograph constantly, every hour, every conscious hour,’ Dorothea Lange told an interviewer in 1963, two years before she died. There had always been constraints on how she could photograph: first, the limp that remained after she had polio when she was seven, growing up in Hoboken, New Jersey in a German immigrant family; then the need to make money at...

When​ is the right time to ask for what you want? One of the strange things about the feminist movement is that what women want hasn’t been that much of a mystery at all. (Mary Wollstonecraft, Sojourner Truth, Simone de Beauvoir: century after century, girls just wanna be human, not other.) But finding the moment to speak and the words to use? Reading Breanne Fahs’s collection of...

Almost​ from the moment she published The Second Sex in November 1949, Simone de Beauvoir was asked why she’d never written a female character who lived a free life, the sort she imagined in her final chapter, ‘The Independent Woman’. If the mother of 20th-century feminism couldn’t imagine a free woman, who could? At first she would answer brusquely. ‘I’ve...

Iwas a little woman​ the last time I read children’s books, but this autumn, inching out of depression, I went back to the ones I loved as a girl (Ballet Shoes, A Little Princess) and read others (The Secret Garden, Little Women) for the first time. I am accidentally on trend: the Sunday Times recently declared ‘Civil War strumpet’ – high collars, low hems, frilly...